Posts from — June 2015

Housing 150 plant varieties and a fully organic, chemical-free soilless cultivation system made from 5,400 square feet of hemp and wool panels that recycles its entire water usage.

By Trendstop.Com
June 17, 2015

Excerpt:

In Paris, Galeries Lafayette is taking up the challenge to make the city a more bio-diverse and eco-friendly place with a new urban farming initiative. The famous department store has teamed up with the French Association of Soilless Cultivation to create a hanging fruit and vegetable garden, which is the first instalment in an ongoing citywide project aiming to not only inspire city dwellers to ‘grow their own,’ but also to develop a new economic activity for the capital.

Should I grow marijuana indoors or outdoors? | ‘Growing Grass’ (Part 1) In the first video of our growing marijuana series, we met with cannabis farmers, Michelle and Tyson Haworth, who explain the pros and cons of indoor and outdoor growing.

“If you leave them out in weeks of rain,” he said, “you will just get rotten marijuana.”

By Noelle Crombie
The Oregonian/OregonLive
June 27, 2015

Excerpt:

You’ve got to be 21 or older to possess and grow cannabis in Oregon and your yard should be a private place where neighbors and passersby can’t easily see your plants.

Oregon’s new marijuana law allows people not only to possess marijuana, but also to grow it at home. Every household may have up to four marijuana plants.

Harriet Nakabaale shows some crops in eggshells that she grows as part of her extended farming in her sack garden.

“We need people, especially in the urban areas to engage in agriculture, regardless of limited land. And the answer is sack farming.”

By Mathias Wandera
The Monitor
06/20/2015
Excerpt:

“I started by collecting huge sacks that had been dumped around my neighbourhood. Given that I have always had a poultry house, I was able to compost chicken manure that had accumulated in the coop. This I mixed with black soil to enrich the soil. But I did not just fill the sacks with the soil, I had to place small pebble stones at the middle of the sack, right from bottom to top, then filled the sack with soil leaving the stones erect in the middle,” the mother of three says.

Republic of Cabo Verde,[5] is an island country spanning an archipelago of 10 volcanic islands in the central Atlantic Ocean. Located 570 kilometres (350 mi) off the coast of Western Africa, the islands cover a combined area of slightly over 4,000 square kilometres (1,500 sq mi).

Funded by the FAO with a total of US$400,000

Macua Hub
June 19th, 2015

Excerpt:

A project aimed at urban and suburban production of fruit, vegetables, roots, tubers and ornamental plants will begin in the capital of Cabo Verde (Cape Verde), Praia, said the country’s Minister of Rural Development, Eva Ortet.

The minister, cited by newspaper A Semana, said the project, to be carried out by the central government, was part of a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) programme to create subsistence green belts in cities and surrounding areas that it calls “urban and suburban agriculture.”

The roof top garden beds on their King Street home, in which the Fitzgeralds plant vegetables and herbs, resemble what they witnessed on their journey.

By Jonathan Waddell
HALIFAX — Special to The Globe and Mail
Jun. 18, 2015

Excerpt:

She, and her husband and builder, Brainard Fitzgerald, wanted to see how urban agriculture was accomplished in countries where the practice was a necessity. Their rare partnership harkens back to the roots of the profession when architects combined the talents of designer and craftsman.

She proposed to visit countries in Central and South America and Cuba, a place to which Ms. Fitzgerald now takes her students from Dalhousie University School of Architecture.

The tax break’s greatest benefit is its potential to clean, fill, and beautify the city, which she expects will restore the economic health and confidence both of Baltimore and of its residents.

By Julianne Tveten
Seedstock
15 June 2015

Excerpt:

Urban farmers in the city of Baltimore will soon qualify for a 90 percent property tax break under a bill recently approved by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The move, which is the latest in a series of tax-break initiatives for city growers seen in areas like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., is intended to bolster local production of healthy food.

Drafted by Councilman William “Pete” Welch, the bill, which will likely go into effect next month, gives a tax credit to farmers who make at least $5,000 per year selling crops and raise no more than five acres of land.

“We are constantly reshaping our environment to meet our needs, forgetting that other species also live in it,” Agnes Lyche Melvaer, head of the Bybi, an environmental group supporting urban bees, which is leading the project.

“To correct that we need to return places to them to live and feed,” she explained, sitting on a bench in a lush city centre square bursting with early Nordic summer growth.

Cuba has a unique and highly productive agricultural system in the cities and on the fringes of suburbia. Javier Ignacio Acuña Ditzel/Flickr

Both farmers and the Cuban government will need to work out how to resist international market pressures. Otherwise the unique, productive model of Cuban urban and peri-urban agriculture may disappear.

By Julia Wright
Senior Research Fellow, Agroecological Futures at Coventry University
By Emily Morris
Research Associate, Institute of the Americas, UCL at UCL
The Conversation
June 18, 2015

Excerpt:

However, two factors protect the Cuban urban agriculture model.

The first is that it has become well-established. Farmers understand and have committed to agroecological principles, at least in urban and peri-urban zones. On the government side, the model has proven it can achieve development priorities and is enshrined in policy.

Plans to open an organic market, after acquiring the vacant property at 5362 N. Saginaw Street, near the intersection of Princeton Avenue. King said some outdoor vending will be open in a few weeks. Jake May | MLive.com

King purchased the building for about $3,000

By Sarah Schuch
Mlive
June 17, 2015

Excerpt:

King started Harvesting Earth eight years ago in vacant lots on Princeton Avenue. He now has multiple properties next to each other with three hoop houses growing produce, like tomatoes, kale, peppers and strawberries.

In 2013, it became the first urban farm in Genesee County to be certified organic.

Urban bee farming is a mark of an improved city environment, as bees can only survive in habitats abundant with trees and flowers. (image: Urban Bees Seoul)

Researchers can also learn more about a city’s air quality by examining the number of bees in the city.

Korea Bizwire
June 17, 2015

Excerpt:

Seoul is housing more beehives as citizens are increasingly interested in the unique experience of bee farming.

A citizen school for bee farming has seen its second term students this year, and apiaries can now be found on the roofs of Seoul’s UNESCO building, a building around Yangjae Station, a Seoul University building and a building on Nodeul Island.

Elementary aged kids are learning about local foods this week. As a part of a weeklong summer camp hosted by Matthew 25, a local non-profit, the kids are getting their hands dirty with planting and picking. They spend most of the week on an urban farm near downtown Cedar Rapids.

“There’s different kinds, bigger and smaller, and it’s just fun to try different foods,” fourth-grader Logan Liddiard said.

The Urban Pastoral team showcased their vertical growing system on the Johns Hopkins campus over alumni weekend.

The first visible step of progress will be a greenhouse designed from a shipping container, intended to supply food to local restauranteurs as well as Bon Appétit.

By Katie Pearce
HUB
June 16, 2015

Excerpt:

Ultimately, Reidy intends to fulfill his original vision for a commercial-scale urban farming facility that he says could produce more than 300,000 pounds of greens and herbs in Baltimore each year—”enough to feed an entire school system, or an entire hospital.”

To do this, the team will need a rooftop with more than 20,000 square feet to build upon. Urban Pastoral is currently exploring two options: the old Hoen Lithograph factory in East Baltimore, and the former Gwynns Falls Park Junior High School building in West Baltimore, which the Green Street Academy charter school is expected to move into this fall.

The Chicago Botanic Garden has planted a 20,000 square-foot vegetable and herb garden, the largest in the Midwest, at McCormick Place West.

By Paulina Firozi
Chicago Tribune
June 15, 2015

Excerpt:

After a trip to Germany, former Mayor Richard M. Daley returned with a mission to turn Chicago into a green-movement leader and installed the city’s first green roof atop City Hall in 2000.

In the years since, green roofs have gotten a lot of attention, and Chicago has been recognized as one of the leaders in North America. The city has more than 5.5 million square feet on more than 500 rooftops, Strazzabosco said.

But even that is still a small number. Those 500 green roofs represent a little less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Chicago’s more than half a million buildings. In Germany, experts said in 2010 that 15 to 20 percent of the flat roofs in the country were green.

There’s a common misconception that you can’t grow food in San Francisco—that it’s too urban, or this or that. That’s absolutely not true.

By Brie Mazurek, CUESA
KQED
June 13, 2015

Excerpt:

CUESA: Tell us about the Urban Agriculture Program and how it’s developed over the last year.

Hannah Shulman: In 2012, people in San Francisco wanted there to be one place where they could get all the information they needed on urban agriculture, everything from where to get materials to build your garden to how to get a permit to build a garden on your property. We are now in 2015, our one-year anniversary.

I shot the video in one day during a press trip to Cuba organized by the German NGO Welthungerhilfe. The NGO has supported the City Garden featured in the video for more than ten years.

Video and text by Roland Brockmann
2015

I visited the city garden of Alamar in Havana a short time after the handshake between Barack Obama and Raul Castro. Therefore one of the goals of my visit was to find out how Cubans farmers see the new political climate between the US and Cuba. What are their hopes and worries?

Miguel Lopez, the president of the cooperative, was very positive about the political convergence. “This process of opening up is important for Cuba.” he said. “There’s a global community and we’re going to be joining it now.”

Because the garden produce is strictly organic, Lopez was especially excited about the opportunity of exporting organic food to nearby Florida. He wasn’t worried about the risk of cheap produce destroying the domestic market.